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How is the waste not an issue? I have never heard the argument of it being stolen to be honest. Here in germany the problem with the waste is, that there is no good place to put it (though this is partly a political problem)
in the USA they won't re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.
also we won't use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.
yes, it's all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won't let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don't understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it. a lot of political problems are like this. we have active solutions for many social problems, but people refuse to allow them to be implemented because of fear and delusional belief.
Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that's the spent fuel rods. The majority of "nuclear waste" is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It's obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it's mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.
So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that's is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.
I think you have no clue how dangerous that waste is. There is literally no way to store it in a volume like you described because of all the heat it generates. If it gets distributed for some reason, it could contaminate the entire planet.
Also, other nuclear waste is not not dangerous. You have to store it in a way that it doesn't pollute water, for example. That is a much harder problem than you might think. Here is an interesting read for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Because the amount of waste we've created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:
There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don't know a lot about this so I won't get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.
But long term storage also isn't easy. Maybe it's less of a problem in the US (you've got a lot more free space where no one lives) but it has to be made sure that it does not contaminate the surroundings, even in thousands of years and more. Another (as of yet unsolved) problem is far more human. How do we mark those places, if at all. See this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain, plenty of storage (if you're politicians let it be used for its purpose) that is pretty easy to secure for centuries (and after that probably pretty easy as well). Assuming you close it up well when full, even future historians probably will have an idea that it's dangerous by the level of difficulty to just get into it.
Not trying to discount the issue, just point out that there generally are solutions to the issues around nuclear waste, just that politicians have mucked it up quite a bit in the past (especially in the US).
The idea in germany are old mines, we already have some "temporary" solution (an old saltmine) but there are some problems with it. Understandably there is a lot of nimbyism around the permanent storage, which makes finding a good spot a lot harder
Until Harry Reid does everything in his power to shut it down like an asshole
eh, i'm 50% talking out of my ass here, but the waste is actually not a problem. if we wanted to, we could use it again to extract even more energy out of it ... problem is that that's currently not economical.
"using it again" would require special reactor designs that can stimulate the material to do extra-decay. which causes the extra cost.
That is more like 99% out of your ass.